This was a site redesign for a two-year old site. Like most redesigns it was not that the old site was bad, it just was very caught up in the zeitgeist at the time. The page was 700-pixels wide, used a simple color scheme, and didn't have a banner than conveyed its brand. The site needed to be about the bridge between the state and the campus, so the visuals had to reflect that: the capitol on the left, the campus on the right, and alumniforwisconsin.org in between.
The site is wider (so that it's three-column layout had a wide enough center column to support more content, like video), the design cleaner (one might wonder when the "clean layout" zeitgeist of Web 2.0 will fade), and the colors softened while still being contemporary and sophisticated.
It also utilizes RSS to display and to deliver news. A Bloglines account allows staff to find relevant news in the 20+ feeds it subscribes to and to cherry-pick news items of value into its blog (which is where non-subscription stories can go). The blog hosts its own RSS feed, which is rendered into the home page and news page. The feed is made available to anyone who wants to subscribe.